HEAD FROM ANNUNCIATION (GIOTTO)
BRIDE MARRIAGE AT CANA (GIOTTO)
SAINT'S HEAD (MOSAIC, ST. MARK'S VENICE)
A very serious objection that would seem to have so much weight as to preclude all possibility of accepting as true the large numbers mentioned, is the fact that it is very hard to understand how such an immense number of students could have been supported in any town of the Middle Ages. This objection has carried so much weight to some minds as to make them give up the thought of large numbers at the medieval universities. Professor Laurie has answered it very effectively, however, and in his plausible explanation gives a number of points which emphasize the intense ardor of these students of the Middle Ages in their search for knowledge, and shows how ready they were to bear serious trials and inconveniences, not to say absolute sufferings and hardships, in order that they might have opportunities for the higher education. The objection then redounds rather to the glory of the medieval universities than lessens their prestige, either as regards numbers or the enthusiasm of their students.
"The chief objection to accepting the tradition (of large numbers at the universities) lies in the difficulty of seeing how in those days, so large a number of the young men of Europe could afford the expense of residence away from their homes. This difficulty, however, is partly removed when we know that many of the students were well to do, that a considerable number were matured men, already monks and canons, and that the endowments of Cathedral schools also were frequently used to enable promising scholars to attend foreign universities. Monasteries also regularly sent boys of thirteen and fourteen to university seats. A papal instruction of 1335 required every Benedictine and Augustinian community to send boys to the universities in the proportion of one in twenty of their residents. Then, state authorities ordered free passages for all who were wending their way through the country to and from the seat of learning. In the houses of country priests—not to speak of the monastery hospitals—traveling scholars were always accommodated gratuitously, and even local subscriptions were frequently made to help them on their way. [{66}] Poor traveling scholars were, in fact, a medieval institution, and it was considered no disgrace for a student to beg and receive alms for his support."
After reading these authoritative opinions, it would be rather difficult to understand the false impressions which have obtained so commonly for the last three centuries with regard to education in the Middle Ages, if we did not realize that history, especially for English-speaking people, has for several centuries been written from a very narrow standpoint and with a very definite purpose. About a century ago the Comte de Maistre said in his Soirées de St. Petersburg, that history for the three hundred years before his time "had been a conspiracy against the truth." Curiously enough the editors of the Cambridge Modern History in their first volume on the Renaissance, re-echoed this sentiment of the French historical writer and philosopher. They even use the very words "history has been a conspiracy against the truth" and proclaim that if we are to get at truth in this generation, we must go behind all the classical historians, and look up contemporary documents and evidence and authorities once more for ourselves. It is the maintenance of a tradition that nothing good could possibly have come out of the Nazareth of the times before the Reformation, that has led to this serious misapprehension of the true position of those extremely important centuries in modern education—the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth.
To those who know even a little of what was accomplished in these centuries, it is supremely amusing to read the childish treatment accorded them and the trivial remarks that even accredited historians of education make with regard to them. Occasionally, however, the feeling of the reader who knows something of the subject is not one of amusement, but far from it. There are times when one cannot help but feel that it is not ignorance, but a deliberate purpose to minimize the importance of these times in culture and education, that is at the basis of some of the utterly mistaken remarks that are made. We shall take occasion only to give one example of this, but that will afford ample evidence of the intolerant spirit that characterizes the work of some even of the supposedly most enlightened historians of education. The quotation will be from Compayré's [{67}] "History of Pedagogy" which is, I understand, in use in nearly every Normal School in this country and is among the books required in many Normal School examinations.